csammisrun

Last weekend I attempted to do my own vehicular repair work yet again. A mechanic informed me that the right front tie rod end was worn out and was destroying the tire (true story, it was pretty bald on the inside), and after consulting my service manual, I gave it a shot. This is what I found:

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Long story short, I couldn’t penetrate its +1 Armor of Rusted-The-Hell-On, and I had to take it to a National Tire and Battery to have it fixed. That weekend did not end well in terms of my ego, but I turned that situation around with the advent of this gloriously long weekend.

On Saturday, I got to use my grill for the first time in quite a while. Overland Park has this ordinance that prevents grills from being used or stored at apartment complexes that are built like mine, and so my Weber has resided in the trunk of my car since I moved here. It was released back to the world by the grace of a barbecue that a friend of mine hosted Saturday evening, at which I was the grillmaster. It was only four people, burgers and brats, but it was indeed a good time.

I spent Sunday being mechanically apt. I finally put my Nerf Longshot – a very large Nerf bolt-action rifle – back together after modding it for increased distance and speed. Better o-rings in the cylinder, a second stronger spring on the piston, and removal of the Nerf-installed air restrictor have given it quite a kick (no fooling, you can feel the recoil now). I was planning on taking it to work to stage a little inter-team warfare and take down a remote controlled helicopter that’s been buzzing us, but I had forgotten how very large it is…I couldn’t even begin to get it in the door without raising a few eyebrows.

After the Longshot, I took out my French horn. It’s been a long time since it’s been out, and it needed some cleaning and oiling, but once it was fixed up I decided it needed a more prominent place in the apartment:

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Ba-dum-bum!

The moon was very bright last night and, having received instructions on how to take a picture of the moon last time it was full, decided to try my hand:

These were taken about 9:45 PM. The recommended camera settings are 1/250″ shutter speed and F11 aperture, these were taken at 1/250″, F8 (because that’s as high as my camera will go) and 12x zoom. I did these without an actual tripod, just crouching down and balancing the camera on the rail of my porch. Next time I’ll try it with a tripod as that got uncomfortable very fast.

Just for comparison’s sake, here’s a picture with the camera at the same position, same settings, except with a 1x zoom. Where da moon at??

I can see a lot of stars where I live. This is completely novel to me having lived in Chicago, Ames, and Des Moines over the past 24 years. Last night I decided to see if the stars were, in fact, bright enough for my camera to pick up. The results were encouraging, if not a little noisy:

I spent about fifteen minutes outside (it was cold!) fiddling with the manual settings on my camera. I was using a tripod and a 30″ shutter speed, but I wasn’t having much luck until I turned up the ISO to 400 and messed with the apeture…I forget in which direction. That got me some stars, but also a lot of noise in the image. I’m going to spend the next few nights fiddling with settings until I get something clear. If I can keep the long shutter speeds with less noise, some fairly sweet pictures might result. Even in this picture, you can see movement trails. I thought at first it was jitter on the tripod, but when I thought about it, the trails line up with the movement of the Earth. Now that is cool

We interrupt this regularly scheduled week of the same wallpaper to post a picture that I took of a spider on its web that was on my porch. Now, ordinarily I hate spiders with a passion that outburns the fiery hearts of a thousand suns, but this guy was just hanging out and I realized that I could use him to figure out how to manually set the focal length on my camera. It turns out that my camera’s manual focus settings might be a little stupid — I can guaruntee that I was not 90cm away from the spider when I took this shot, although that’s how it focused…maybe it meant 90mm — but I think it came out alright for a first attempt.

Click for high-res (and I mean high-res). You can see parts of the spider that would make an entymologist blush.